Punjabi music was recorded commercially from the early twentieth century on 78 rpm discs by the Gramophone Company and others at Lahore, Calcutta and Bombay.
That material includes folk singers, dhadis, qawwals, kirtan and early film music, and a large part of it survives only on shellac in private collections.
All India Radio Jalandhar and Radio Pakistan Lahore hold recordings from the 1940s onward of performers who were never commercially recorded, including village folk singers brought into the studio. Neither archive is fully catalogued or accessible.
The cassette era from the 1980s produced an enormous quantity of Punjabi recording, most of it commercially released and much of it now unavailable in any format.
The rababi kirtan tradition at the Golden Temple, which ended in 1947, may exist on early recordings and nobody has looked systematically.
This is the least attended-to part of Punjab's heritage and the most physically fragile.
Radio Jalandhar's Punjabi service began in 1948 and it made the careers of Asa Singh Mastana and Narinder Biba, neither of whom would have been heard beyond a district otherwise. Surinder Kaur and Prakash Kaur were not its creation; Surinder Kaur had made her debut on Radio Lahore in 1943. What the station broadcast reached everybody. What it kept is a different question and nobody outside it can answer it.
Shellac breaks and it breaks completely. A 78 is not a format that degrades gracefully. The discs that survive are in the houses of a few dozen collectors in Lahore, Delhi, Amritsar and abroad, most of them elderly, and no two of those collections have ever been listed against each other.
The oral material, the songs sung at weddings and at work, was recorded by researchers in small quantities from the 1950s. Most of those tapes sit in institutional storage without listings.